“Some of these stories are closer to my own life than others are, but not one of them is as close as people seem to think.” Alice Murno, from the intro to Moons of Jupiter

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see." Arthur Schopenhauer

“Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Purgatory.’ Show me where it says ‘relics, monks, nuns.’ Show me where it says ‘Pope.’” –Thomas Cromwell imagines asking Thomas More—Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Sunday, October 30, 2016

Mending Roofs: He Borara Ch 4.1

Lac wakes the next morning to the
sound of rain and buffeting wind. Panic builds as he becomes aware of how much
time he’s passed unconscious. Patting himself down, feeling around for the
shotgun, sitting up to check if the door is still closed and locked, he
hurriedly runs down the list of top worries. Nothing seems amiss. He gradually
comes to realize his unsettledness, his sense of there being something terribly
wrong, is coming from nothing other than the fact that he’s been left alone for
longer than he has at any other time since arriving. The reason nobody’s
bothered him, moreover, is that none of the Yąnomamö wants to leave the shabono
when it’s raining this hard.

For now at least, all is well.

Sitting upright in his hammock, he
lifts the mosquito net, ducks under it, and steps over to the window, which,
despite being tucked under the eaves, is letting in a constant spray of mist
and irregular spurts of larger droplets. The clay floor at his feet is cold and
slimy. Outside, he sees the wind lashing the tops of the trees enwrapping the
shabono and the surrounding gardens—some invisible winged monster charging
through the branches and leaves with destructive abandon, hissing and howling
in fury. The trees are so gargantuan, and the effect of the wind so violent,
Lac feels exposed in a way unfamiliar to most people who grow up in a
city—though he remembers storms coming in from over Lake Michigan that inspired
in him a similar feeling of awe before the enormous power of nature.

You’re left wondering as you
scramble about at the feet of such colossal forces clashing and colliding
overhead, should we even be here? Do we have any business making homes in
places where the weather can, with no warning, wipe the earth clean of us with
but a swipe or two of its monstrous invisible tail?

In their cities, humans look up and
marvel at all the monuments to their own species’ industry and ingenuity: the
miles-long bridges over the churning seas, the endless vistas of spear-tipped,
towering feats of engineering godhood, all these reminders, available at a
glance, of what tiny insignificant specs each of us is, how inconsequential our
individual contributions to the collective force that is humanity’s march
through history, its tidal thrust over the surface of the globe, its suspension
over the seas, its rise into the fathomless firmament, its travels through the
clouds. And it all started here, in places like this, where people were made to
feel just as tiny, just as vulnerable and insignificant before the forces of
nature and the ceaseless unfolding of time. Perhaps the one grew out of a
response to the other.

Such idle musings, and here I’m
supposed to be a professional anthropologist.

The wind batters the sides of the
hut, and Lac worries about the mud walls’ ability to withstand the assault. It’s
been here for years, he thinks. What are the chances it would lift off the
foundation, or be smashed to smithereens by flying branches, a few days after I
arrive? His next thought is of how, since opening his eyes, he’s gone from
panic, to relief, to transcendent entrancement, only to end up back at mild panic again as he listens to the walls of the hut strain and whistle. At
least I finally got a good night’s sleep before getting tossed back into the
wringer. He laughs, steps from the window over to his trunk, and starts the
process, just complicated enough to be mildly irritating, of digging out some
crackers and a jar of peanut butter. Then he checks his pots to see if he has
enough water to make coffee.

Lac has heard these storms can last
as little as ten minutes, but for all he knows it could go on all day. He claps
his palms together to kill a mosquito, and then another, repeating the exercise
until he’s cleared away most of the bugs hovering conspicuously about the hut
as part of their ill-fated attempt at escaping from the heavy winds and rain.
Lifting his pot, he’s sees there may be just enough water for a single cup of
coffee; he considers drinking it straightaway to quench a night’s worth of
thirst, but he keeps himself in check by thinking about how strong he’ll make
the coffee, how good the jolt of energy will feel, how divine the blossoming of
mental clarity.

He sets about firing up the stove,
curious to see if he’ll have the same trouble with the primer now that he’s
alone in the hut and the humidity is dropping from the air as actual water.
Once the stove is lit—with nary a need for stamping out unintended flames—he
places on the pot, and then he moves to the door to set the other, empty pot
outside to gather rainwater, in case he’s trapped in the hut all day by the
storm. I’ll probably have to pick a million bugs out of it, he thinks, and
that’s before I boil it. Indeed, anytime he peers closely enough into the
thatched roof overhead—or too closely rather—he’s able to see it come alive
with the movements of cockroaches and centipedes and God knows what else.

As if on cue, the wind gives the
walls another stiff shove, and a few roaches actually fall from the ceiling
onto the floor nearby. I wonder if it would even do any good if I tried to
clean them out, he thinks; probably not—it’d be about as effective as trying to
kill all the mosquitoes in the hut before I go to sleep.

As he mixes his coffee and the
powdered milk into a bitter café con leche, he wonders what he can do to make
the most of this unexpected gift of privacy. It would be nice, he thinks, to
lie back in my hammock and read for a couple of hours. He has yet to empty his
bladder or void his bowels this morning, and the first sip of his coffee
aggravates them both. Peeing is no issue, but I’d prefer being some distance
away from the hut before I shit; this place smells bad enough as it is.

He breathes the air in slowly
through his nostrils. Just now, the hut smells
of coffee, his own body odor, to which he’s becoming acclimated, the fresh
wetness of the rain, the loamy rich dirt of the earth and the floor, and the
sickly putrescence of mold and rotting plant life. It’s such a lively, pungent mixture, he thinks, colorful even. Back
home, an absence of any powerful smells is the norm; here, you’re incessantly
awaft in competing odors, each one heavy enough on its own to demand attention.
I’ve already habituated enough not to be constantly distracted, constantly nauseated,
but I doubt they’ll ever fade from my attention completely. Smell is like an
added dimension to every scene out here, one people in cities lose all but the
vaguest awareness of through aggressively hygienic neglect.

He stands up, takes a long sip of
coffee, sets down his cup, and moves to the door, planning to step outside,
piss somewhere he’s unlikely to walk in the near future, and survey the scene for
a safe place to jog off and take a shit. With the door open, though, he hears
shouting. His knees pop forward, a reflex that drops him into a crouch. He
ducks behind the doorframe. Since his arrival a few days ago with Clemens, he
can’t help interpreting every unexpected sound, especially that of Yąnomamö men
shouting, as a harbinger of attack. Still hiding behind the door, Lac pricks
his ears, but the rain spattering against the ground and the leaves of the
distant trees drones loudly on, overwhelmed only by brief insistent gusts of
wind. The sounds and smells are as violent and impatient as the people, he
thinks, maintaining their relentless assault on his sense of security and on
his… what? On his own patience, his own forbearance.

And when they finally succeed—if
you ever let them succeed—in toppling that forbearance, what then? Do you go
berserk and start throwing haymakers? You’d be a walking pincushion before you
could throw a second punch. Would you go on a shooting spree with your shotgun?
Even then, you’d have to pick your targets carefully. You don’t have enough
bullets, and anyway you wouldn’t be able to reload fast enough. Killing even
one of them would almost certainly mean you getting killed in turn. And anyway,
like it or not, you need these people, not just for your work but for your
survival. So for now, probably for as long as you’re in the territory, you just
have to accept you’re completely at their mercy. You need to keep in mind at
all times that allowing your forbearance to be toppled is not an option—or if
it is an option, it’s a deadly one.

Lac sees nothing but the
water-laden trees, whose extra burden makes seem even more outsized and
otherworldly, which in turn makes the wind seem even more absurdly powerful as
it barrels through the branches, treating their solid mass to swirling liquid
upheaval. He steps out beside the door to piss, sure that the downpour will
effectively obliterate any trace. When he hears the shouting again, he turns
toward the shabono, the obvious source of the sounds.

What are they up to now?

Lac steps back inside the hut,
dripping wet already. They must have some ritual for greeting the storm, he
thinks. I have to get over there. He goes to his trunk and sifts around until
he finds a greenish gray tarp he plans to wrap around himself, using it as a
poncho. His stomach churns; he still has to shit, but he’s determined to
document whatever is going on in the village. Charging out into the storm, he
wonders how safe it is to duck down and waddle through the passage into the
enclosure now, when no one can hear him announcing himself, amid whatever
commotion is taking place on the other side of the massive wall.

They’re obviously quick of eye, he
reassures himself. Have you once seen them fire an arrow at something they didn’t
intend to kill? No, but I’ve only been here a few days, participated in a
single hunt. And anyway their having deadly intentions whenever they loose an
arrow is hardly encouraging.

The stretch of soggy ground between
Clemens’s hut and the outer wall of the shabono must be traversed cautiously,
lest he slip or sink into the softer mud. He has one last moment of hesitation
before ducking down between the piles of wood, thinking he should maybe free up
the space in his bowels before committing to whatever it is he’s about to get
himself into. But he’s heard the voices, shouting, chanting, grow louder as he
approached, and his curiosity gets the better of him. Shuffling along sideways
in his deep squat, Lac feels his butthole pinch tight again in commemoration of
his first day in the field. Once again, he emerges inside the shabono safe and
intact, without encountering any reception at all, violent or otherwise.

He stands up to see a mostly empty
courtyard, the people for the most part having sought refuge under their
family’s section of the huge circular roofing structure. Not everyone is hiding
though. On the far end, Lac sees a smattering of men moving about, swift and
aggressive. As he watches through the heavy rain, he comes to believe he’s
witnessing a battle, one side rushing toward the other in a display of
intimidation, rushing up to some unseen line of scrimmage only to come to an
abrupt halt, loosing their spears to ride the forward momentum, spears and
perhaps stones, along with a catapulting of invective.

Safe across the courtyard from the
fighting, Lac eyes his surroundings for a place to hunker down, where he’ll be
able to view the action and its consequences. He’s standing between two
sections of the structure, so he reasons there’s probably a family occupying
the section to either side. Somehow he never sees these families when he’s
entering or leaving the shabono—though it’s not all that surprising considering
most of the shabono seems empty throughout the day. Such is the footloose
nature of the Yąnomamö. But just as he’s stepping into the section to his
right, he sees a woman who’s not hiding at all. She’s tending a fire, doing her
best to keep it alight and protected from the high winds. It’s the woman he saw
with Bahikoawa, the one who was helping him with the gardening, the one Lac
supposes is a young wife and not a daughter.

Have I been waddling in through the
headman’s house this whole time?

Trying not to be rude, as difficult
as it is to know what would constitute rudeness out here in the jungle, Lac
scans the rest of the house, the hammocks, the plantains hanging in thick
profusion from the rafters. Bahikoawa himself is nowhere to be seen, but there
is another woman here, along with a bunch of scared kids. His sons and
daughters? The other woman is older, having already lost her shape—all those
pregnancies, all those heavy loads of firewood—but still what Lac considers
young. Still pretty. Another of the headman’s wives? A sister? If she is
another wife, is it only the headman who gets to have more than one?

Still on the edge of the house,
still getting soaked beneath his tarp, Lac turns back to the battle taking
place across the plaza. It’s not a real battle; that’s clear to him now. The men,
at intervals, take turns getting a running start and launching invisible
objects into the air, but Lac can’t see any way they’d be divided into teams. He
can’t see their faces from where he stands either, but he’s reasonably sure he
recognizes most of them; they’re all from this village—or at least they’ve been
in this village as long as he has.

There’s an exaggerated quality to
their movements, similar to the way they carry on during their hallucinogen-sharing
sessions. Lac traverses the outermost rim of the courtyard, making his way to
where the action is taking place. He sees all the frightened children, the
mothers, some ignoring the kids, some trying to comfort them. What have they
seen, Lac wonders, that’s making them so terrified of this storm? Or is it a
more instinctive fear, deeper somehow, more primal than any conditioned
response? He turns back to the half-fighting, half-dancing men and listens for
any recognizable words in their chant-shouting.

I should be recording this, he
thinks, but I couldn’t very well bring the tape recorder out in rain this heavy.
Once he’s close enough to observe, but still distant enough not to interfere or
draw attention, he squats down to watch the men rail at the storm clouds, and in
the process is reminded he still has to shit. He’d like nothing better right
now than to sit on a nice toilet in a clean bathroom, warm and dry, smoking a
cigarette while attending to his business. But he shakes away the image and
concentrates on the scene taking place in the shabono’s central courtyard.

The Yąnomamö exhibit a looseness in
their joints, a mad excess of mobility and expression. As a kid, Lac was
fascinated with the Plains Indians, the Cheyenne, the Blackfoot, the Comanche,
proud atop their horses, upright, their dignity on casual display in their slow,
deliberate movements and parsimonious expenditures of energy. That’s how Lac
had thought of them anyway, an image pulled piecemeal from his explorer books
and from movies, which portrayed them either as formidable threats—bloodthirsty
savages—or as wise and stalwart companions, holders of forgotten keys to a more
spiritual, fuller life.

Comparing the Yąnomamö to his old
fantastical conception of the proud noble savage, Lac can’t help feeling
cheated. Watching them hurl both imprecations and invisible projectiles at the
storm, at the spirits they must believe are driving it—or do they think the
winds actually are spirits?—he’s
brought face to face with a quality of theirs he has no other word for than childishness. They puff out their chests
and make unselfconsciously jerky and over-pronounced gestures with their gangly
limbs, like little boys pridefully basking in their mothers’ adoring gaze, even
though their emotional volatility is such that this proud, loose-limbed swagger
could turn at any moment into a simple tantrum, or into a total breakdown.

Boas would be appalled by my
thoughts right now, Lac thinks, quietly chastising himself. But here it is,
right in front of me. It may merely be my own idiosyncratic impression, and it
may say more about my own character and my own upbringing than theirs, but
these Indians give every appearance, however physically mature, of a
perpetually stunted mindset. I mean, they’re throwing a fit to protest a
thunderstorm for Christ’s sake, as least as far as I can tell. Lac imagines one
of the charging men calling out, “Look mom, I’m beating up the storm!” What is
a mother to do but chuckle?

He cranes his neck to see if he can
discern what the other villagers make of this production, sure that whatever
secret wisdom he was hoping to discover out here—though he’d never have
acknowledged hoping for any such thing—will remain forever out of reach, probably
because it doesn’t exist. This is what lies beneath that promise you saw in the
glint from that young man’s eye as he stood on a stone parting the currents of
the Orinoco. This is that wildness that held you in such thrall. Were you
somehow hoping to embody it? Are you still?

In a way, though, it makes sense
that there would be a performative aspect to all the Yąnomamö’s behaviors.
Everything they do is either in easy view of the hundred or so people living in
the shabono with them or at most a few stages away in a game of telephone. You
couldn’t take a runny shit outside Bisaasi-teri without everyone inside knowing
within moments that you have diarrhea—a proposition he suspects he’s about to
test himself. It would be like being hunkered down with your graduating class
from high school your entire life. In fact, considering the Yąnomamö live much
closer to how humans spent most of their evolutionary history than those of us
from advanced nations do, you can see why embarrassing episodes from our
adolescence—those damned folding chairs at the assembly—leave such indelible
marks.

Lac stands up and steps sideways as
the wind picks up, setting the edges of his tarp to flapping. Bracing against
the driving rain, he seeks out a spot where he can enjoy a small bit of shelter
under the roof while still keeping the embattled shamans—of whom he counts
six—in view. He need only make sure no overprotective braves occupy the section
he’s chosen. Braves? The word seems inappropriate enough on its own, but it
also troubles Lac that it’s the first one his mind tossed up to him. As he
stands beside a support post, watching the high drama of the ritual donnybrook,
he hears the wind tearing at the thatching overhead, feels the force of the
gales judder through the wood; he realizes that the massiveness of the shabono
has lent to an unrealistic sense of its stability and resilience.

Peering through the gray light and
the cataracts of rain, he now sees large sections of the roof lifting up off
the support frame with each of the more powerful gusts. Jesus, he thinks, this
whole thing is going to blow away. He finds himself clutching desperately onto
the support post beside him. Turning back toward the shamans, he now looks on their
efforts with a degree of sympathy approaching admiration. That feeling of being
a tiny mote tossed mercilessly about by the unfathomable forces of the physical
world returns, and instead of seeing the shamans’ struggle as a childish
tantrum triggered by the storm’s affront to their sense of self-importance, he
sees their crudely choreographed mock skirmish as more of an instance of
self-sacrifice, emblematic of their willingness to stand up to the mightiest of
enemies, to put themselves in harm’s way for the sake of their fellow
villagers, to take responsibility for the safety of the group before the most
redoubtable and destructive blows thrown at them by nature, forces capable of
eradicating their home, annihilating their community, erasing their lives from
existence. He senses the sublime beauty behind this act of bravery, as
melodramatic as it may be.

One of the combatants stands out
from the rest for his—what’s the word for it?—for his naturalness, his lack of
ostentation. He displays none of that child-like braggadocio; his deep concern
for the village, and even a trace of fear, register plainly in his visage and
his demeanor. He’s not putting on a show for the onlookers; he’s doing the
deadly serious work of keeping the people of Bisaasi-teri safe. Lac watches
this man gathering some chthonic energy into his hands and casting it into the
roiling heavens. So natural and deep-seated is this man’s belief in his power
to fend off the tumultuous wind and crashing thunder that for a moment Lac’s
skepticism is shaken. Did he feel a shift in the air the instant the man shot
forth the bolt from his hands?

Even as he asks the question in his
mind, the identity of the man becomes clear. It’s the headman, Bahikoawa, the
one person whose name he’s been able to glean, though how Clemens managed to
get anyone to divulge it remains a mystery.

The storm gathers force. It’s hard
to imagine how the shabono can withstand the onslaught. But the men keep up the
fight, undaunted. And Lac, clinging for dear life to the support post, holding
tight to his tattered tarp, curses himself for not having the forethought to
stop before entering the enclosure to take a shit.

***

Once the storm has wreaked sufficient
havoc, the turbulence in the sky quickly peters out, leaving everyone rattled,
dazed, as they mill about, visiting, inspecting the damage, greeting each other
with true gratitude for their continuing existence, true relief. The residue of
their fear underscores Lac’s lateness in recognizing the severity of the
danger. A couple of the women even greet him, patting down his nabä body to
make sure it remains sound and intact, though most of them still seem
determined to give him a wide berth.

Lac wonders how the disruption of
the storm will impact the Yąnomamö’s daily routines. Already, many men are
examining parts of the shabono roof, estimating the effort and resources
required for repairs. From what Lac saw, a few large sections of the thatch
were pulled free from the crossbeams supporting them. Maybe they’ll need to be
bound back down; maybe the thatching will need replacing; maybe the frame will
need to be reinforced. Not overly excited about running off into the jungle to
accompany the men on another hunt, Lac cottons to the idea of working with them
all day here, inside the shabono, to make repairs.

He can help, be of some value, pick
up the language while being industrious at the same time. That scenario is
infinitely more appealing than anything that involves running long distances, or
even short distances, with the festering blisters on the balls of his feet. But
the repairs may not amount to an all-day affair. Already, men are wandering
outside for the day’s gardening—though the garden probably needs plenty of
repairs itself. Women are strapping their large baskets across their foreheads
and taking to the trails to chop and gather up firewood.

Lac looks around, at a loss as to
whose activities to observe and participate in. In truth, that last burst from
the storm has him a little rattled too. The wind scoured the plaza with such
explosive violence it didn’t seem anything could possibly hold fast to the
earth, that it would all be borne aloft and tossed about in the tumultuous
heavens. When it was over, Lac all but sprinted outside for that shit he’d been
putting off, and he was by no means alone in making the diarrheal dash. It
would be impossible to remember all these people’s locations, Lac had thought
while surveying the scene, all the places you need to avoid to keep from
stepping in feces. You’ll just have to keep your eyes open, probably a good
idea anyway, what with all the snakes and fire ants and thorns and everything
else you need to avoid.

Lac has on a couple of occasions
seen a man who moves about the village on a single leg. He has a walking stick
he uses for added balance, but it’s not what any Westerner would consider a
suitable crutch. He really just uses it to steady himself as he hops about, as
if on a pogo stick. To which of the jungle’s myriad dangers, Lac wonders, did
this man lose such a precious appendage? He decides to find his young
translator friend, the one who first understood what he meant by pointing at
various people, and see what information he can convey about the man’s
disability.

It says something about these
people that a man with such a serious injury or deformity can survive among
them. He must benefit from their aid and their—forbearance, just as Lac has
already benefited from them himself, though in his case it has more to do with
avarice than true compassion or fellow-feeling. Lac considers the two men who
came back for him yesterday when he was lost in the woods. Were they hoping to
be rewarded with some items from his store of madohe? If they were, it’s odd
they haven’t shown up at the door of Clemens’s hut demanding payment. Maybe
I’ve misread them, he thinks. Maybe I’ve already begun to judge the entire
tribe based on my encounters with the most aggressive few. If that’s the case,
the remedy is to make a point of talking to more people, something I need to do
anyway.

On the logistics side of his plans,
he also wants to keep checking the hut across the river where he and Clemens hung
their hammocks that first night to see if any representatives of the
Malarialogìa have returned. He’s decided a dugout canoe with an outboard motor
will be vital to his success, not to mention his sanity. With any luck, he’ll
be able to use his Spanish, such as it is, to hitch a ride to some town where
he can make the purchase. It’ll eat into his emergency funds, but at least he
won’t be completely dependent on the comings and goings of his missionary
friend, who said he could be back in as little as two weeks but was
noncommittal. He said it could also be more like a few months. With his own mode
of transportation, Lac could travel upriver to one of the Catholic mission
compounds—a visit he’d have to avoid mentioning to Clemens.

The missionaries may be able to
provide information about the Yąnomamö’s language, customs, and the whereabouts
of their more remote villages. And Lac has lately been feeling like he could
use whatever help he can get, whatever his philosophical differences with the man
on the other side of the outstretched hand. A Catholic mission could likewise
be helpful in arranging transportation in and out of the territory, so he’d
have an easier time getting out to visit Laura and his kids, and they’d have an
easier time getting in to visit him, assuming he can set up adequate protections
and access to amenities—a shaky assumption as things currently stand. If
nothing else, he could use the priests’ shortwave radio to call IVIC and talk
to Laura.

Walking about the shabono, listening
in to the Yąnomamö’s conversations about the damage, he melts at the thought of
hearing his wife’s voice. So much I want to tell her, he thinks. But I’d
probably better keep it to myself even if I do manage to reach her, until I can
assure her I’m not in any danger, or at least convince her I can handle
whatever dangers I’m likely to run up against. Approaching a repair site, Lac
discovers once more how difficult it is to begin communicating with people when
you lack any understanding of the rules governing their social interactions.
What do you say? At what distance do you stand? What do you do while your
interlocutor is speaking? How can you avoid offending him, making him angry,
inciting him to violence?

Usually, Lac finds he has less need
for the answers than he expects, because the demands of yababuji immediately
take the place of any customary greeting. This time, though, the men carry on
with their repairs and their banter as he nears. Has he picked up the standard
greeting yet? Thinking back, he recalls several words that seem to come up
close to the beginning of all the encounters he’s had, shori being the most
familiar of them. Instead of hazarding any of the words now, he opts for
walking up to the damaged area of the structure, touching it, with questioning
looks directed at the individual members of the gathering, and listening, his
notebook at the ready for new vocabulary.

The men take remarkably little
notice of him; one is high on the roof, while several others toss him materials
for, Lac guesses, re-securing the thatching to the frame. One of the most
immediate and persistent differences in communication Lac is struggling with is
that the Yąnomamö don’t nod to signal an affirmative or to encourage a speaker
to continue. Since he can’t manage to stop nodding himself, he has to wonder
what they make of it. For Americans, bobbing your forehead forward and back,
moving your chin up and down, comes so naturally it never occurs to you people
in other cultures might rely on alternative means to signal assent. Lac keeps
trying to encourage the Yąnomamö to expand—or to merely continue speaking—by
nodding like an idiot. One of the men has already started mocking him for the
strange habit, followed by many of the children.

Try to suppress your urge to nod
when talking with someone for even an hour—talk about feeling awkward and
self-conscious—and you’ll have a sense of how ingrained the practice is, and
you’ll have a sense of how many of these basic signs make up our common
repertoire of communication tools. Take that and apply it to every aspect of
living among and interacting with an unfamiliar group of people and you can
begin to understand how disorienting and earthshaking the experience is.

Lac doesn’t know who he’s
addressing with these thoughts—future students, Laura, perhaps his father to
explain why he didn’t stick with his plans to stay for seventeen months. But
however strange and out-of-place he feels now, the men are ignoring him. In
place of nodding, they seem to use the word “awei,” which Clemens told him
means “yes.” It must also mean something like “Go on,” or “Uh-huh.” The
single-syllable ma is the word for no. Awei and ma. Yes and no. The binary
foundation of all language.

A couple of the men are closely
examining large, flat leaves with rounded edges. Lac watches as they stack them
and hand them over to another who takes them along as he moves from the lower,
outside edge of the roof, which is about four feet high, up the thirty or forty
foot slope to the higher, inside edge, where it took the severest thrashing
from the storm. The big leaves will then be rolled into thin cylinders and
woven into a pattern of overlapping slats. “Leaf,” Lac says holding one up
before it’s carted away. “Leaf,” he says again, shaking it and holding it up in
front of his face. No one attempts to correct him.

The Yąnomamö go about their
repairs, easily disregarding him. Lac tries to listen and look for chances to
lend a hand. Many of the earliest ethnographers were lawyers, Lac recalls. Most
people are born into societies with well-established laws governing their
behavior with regard to all the major concerns: property, transactions, labor,
the proper treatment of one another’s bodies and possessions. It’s natural to
wonder where it all began. The answer those original anthropologists found was
that it began with kinship rules. No laws as we understand them govern the
lives and interactions of people in primitive societies. Not a single rule is
written down. The rules that do exist aren’t blind to a person’s identity or
status; though even in advanced civilizations it’s much harder to make
high-status individuals pay for their transgressions.

No, people who live as
hunter-gatherers, and probably tribesmen like the Yąnomamö as well, pick up
rules by a sort of cultural osmosis. It’s not as though the rules are never
discussed. They’ll be referenced in disputes should someone be perceived as
failing to live up to his duties. But for the most part you learn them by
seeing them enacted by your elders as you grow up and become socialized. We
would call such rules customs, as opposed to laws. And in this sense, the
native peoples truly are lawless. But sons have obligations to fathers.
Husbands have obligations to fathers-in-law. Brothers to brothers. In such
small bands—hunter-gatherers roam around in groups of at most a few dozen—you
know everyone around you intimately, and chances are you’re related to any
given individual you may interact with throughout the day in at least one way,
often more.

So customs guiding how you choose
to behave toward different types of kin are sufficient to maintain order and
group cohesion. Things get more complicated as group size increases, though,
and that’s one of the reasons unacculturated tribespeople like the Yąnomamö are
so fascinating. Their gardening, their mostly sedentary lives, their villages
of over a hundred, it all marks them as existing in a transitional stage from
small nomadic bands to horticulturalists, a step along the way to agricultural,
even more sedentary living, population explosion—the birth of the state-level
society.

At some point along the way, the
rules for interacting with a given individual became abstracted, so you’re no
longer dealing with mere kinship rules anymore; you’re dealing with the rules
of society. One of the ways societal complexity is allowed to develop is with
support by a type of dynastic scaffolding. Before you can get to a culture
governed by laws, you have to go through a phase in which it’s governed by
powerful men—a family or an individual who’s acquired privileged access to some
valuable resource.

That’s the going theory anyway. Lac
has yet to figure out what resource Bahikoawa has access to that the other men
don’t. And, if organized conflicts are only ever about strategic resources as
well, why are they talking about fighting over women?

Lac continues to observe the men go
about their repairs, looking for opportunities to make himself useful. He finds
himself comparing this work he’s watching now to the type of manual labor he
saw so much of at Connor’s factory in Detroit, or to teachers standing in front
of students sitting in neat rows of desks, or to people working in restaurant
kitchens. At this stage in their cultural evolution, the Yąnomamö don’t have
trades or professions; there are tasks for men—hunting, gardening, liaising
with deities, repairing the shabono—and tasks for women—childrearing, firewood
collecting, water fetching, keeping the house warm and tidy. But there are no
specialized roles like priest or soldier or baker.

Lac slips into his old habit of
marveling at the average civilized adult’s obliviousness before the wonder of
civilization. I guess it’s only natural, he thinks, for us to take for granted
what’s been familiar to us our whole lives. What people fail to appreciate,
though, is just because something seems completely natural, that doesn’t mean
it requires no explanation. How did it become natural is the question. Before
fifteen thousand years ago, even a society as complex as the Yąnomamö would
have been an anomaly. For hundreds of thousands of years, going back to the
origin of humankind as a species, the only people on earth would have been
hunter-gatherers. That’s more time by at least an order of magnitude than has
passed since the advent of agriculture. But somehow even reasonably
well-educated people think of anthropology as an arcane subject, the last
refuge of drugged up hippy professors and their wide-eyed, impressionable
students, ripe for distraction from the more practical professions.

Lac laughs at himself. Talk about
oblivious—you just summed up a whole society’s view of an academic discipline
with reference to your father and brothers alone. He makes a decision. Rather
than follow a group of women along a trail he probably won’t be able to see so
he can help them chop and cart firewood, he’ll begin work on his own mud-and-thatch
hut. The thought alone brings a modicum of relief; he’ll be able to stop
focusing so intently on the Yąnomamö; he’ll have a project all his own; maybe he
won’t have to feel at such a disadvantage, so much at their mercy.

Plus, if he can build a suitable
shelter, he’ll be one step closer to getting Laura out here with the kids, like
they’d originally planned, back when he was scrambling to find a suitable group
to study, after the coup in Brazil took the Suyá off the table. Simply
projecting his mind back to a time when his whole expedition was still in the
planning phase bolsters him. I’ve only been here a few days, he reminds
himself. I’ve got seventeen months to settle in and get in the swing of things.
Stage one: build a hut, learn the language and the basic ins and outs of the
culture (making this perhaps the most difficult of the stages). Stage two:
bring in Laura and the kids, begin your systematic study of the Yąnomamö in
earnest, and figure out which neighboring groups would be good candidates for
conducting further research with. Stage three: lay the groundwork for Nelson
and his team to come and collect the blood samples for their genetic studies. I
should have plenty of genealogical data to hand over to them by then, which
will, with any luck, secure their future collaboration—and funding. Stage four:
we all return home, to Ann Arbor, where I write up my dissertation, defend it
before my doctoral committee, prove I’m proficient in German and Spanish, and
thus earn my doctorate, starting my career as a professional anthropologist.

So learning how to communicate with
a few Indians, maybe making a friend or two—no big deal. Nothing but a minor
hiccup in the larger plan.

One man remains on the roof,
apparently still tying down the newly thatched sections, while the others
gradually disperse. A swell of frustration rises up to wash over Lac’s
momentary sense of mission. “For Christ sake,” he mumbles, “how am I supposed
to learn anything about these people when I don’t even know any of their
goddamned names?” But he’s able to calm himself straightaway. He moves from the
site of the repairs, scanning the faces he sees as he walks to the opening in
the shabono wall where he’ll exit, searching for his young translator, either
of his two rescuers, Bahikoawa, or hell even Waddu-ewantow—anyone he feels
confident he could persuade to help him choose a location, procure the
materials, and set about building a mud-and-thatch hut, which will have to be
sturdy enough, capacious enough, and cozy enough for him to bring his family
to.

Unless, after spending more time
among the Yąnomamö, he decides it’s not safe for his family here, in which case
he’ll just have to tough out the loneliness.

After walking all the way back to
the existing hut without seeing any of his friends, he decides to go to the
river and check for signs of the Malarialogìa personnel’s return to their hut across
the river and a ways into the jungle. Apprehension seizes him almost any time
he nears the edge of the clearing where the gardens and the shabonos sit. The
children, he’s noticed, are mostly kept inside the walls of the enclosure. That
could be to protect them from any number of threats, but it reinforces Lac’s
fear of attack by enemy raiders. The way Bahikoawa examines the trail each
morning, looking for traces, as though the men from the enemy camp may be
lurking just inside the brush, waiting in ambush for some foolhardy soul to
wander out to the fringe—that’s what makes Lac so reticent.

A large branch felled by the storm
lies blocking the trailhead, presenting myriad insects an irresistible invitation
to coalesce in thick swirling clouds. Lac decides to run back to the hut to
grab a machete so he can chop away the deadfall, thus performing a service the Yąnomamö
may appreciate. A feeling of calm spreads through him as the plan forms in his
mind. He needs to be careful, his professors admonished him, not to allow
himself to gravitate away from social interaction with the people whose culture
he’s there to study. There are plenty of shallow ethnographies already, written
by frightened young anthropologists who shied away from delving into the
culture at anywhere near the necessary depth. Because it’s naturally stressful.
It can be overwhelming.

Lac already feels the temptation to
take a break from all the insults to his person, his pride, his sensibilities.
He could just stay in his hut, locked away from Waddu-ewantow, away from all
the children, away from them all, maybe for a day or two. But he senses that
would be the first step along the path to utter withdrawal, culminating in him
rationalizing his way to an early departure from the territory under some
reasonable-sounding pretext. Inside the hut, he lets his eyes linger on the
shotgun leaning against the mud wall, even as he’s deciding not to take it with
him as he works to clear the brush and storm detritus from the trail. It would
get in the way as he worked. And if he set it down somewhere, it would be too
much of a distraction.

He finds a machete in one of the
barrels and then reseals it before heading back outside. A job he’s given
himself to do alone is, strictly speaking, not furthering the objectives of his
research. But it’s meeting himself halfway, giving him a break while not
amounting to the vacation he envisioned, locked away indoors. Passing his new
table on his way to the door, he finds a rag, which he plans to tie over his
mouth to keep the bugs out. He whips it in the air to snap away the dirt and
cobwebs, then heads back to the trailhead.

Maybe an hour has passed by the
time the Yąnomamö men start showing up. Lac has been chopping away at the tangle
of branches, his face and his body gushing torrents of sweat which fall in
pools on the rain-soaked earth. The men saunter up, idly chatting, joking, but
finally step in to haul away several of the branches Lac has severed with his
machete, sweep away piles of leaves and wood chips, and help him pull away the
central bough. Once the job is complete, Lac takes to the trail, eager to wade
into the river and splash away the sweat-drowned gnats he feels sticking to his
torso and limbs. He has a pleasing sense of accomplishment, even of comradery,
as he walks with a couple of the men down to the river. A few women are on the
trail already too, now in urgent need of the day’s supply of water for drinking
and washing.

Lac feels less on-edge, less
apprehensive of the people he sees, maybe because they’ve survived the ordeal
of the storm together. But he suspects it’s his participation in the clean-up
and repair stages that has brought him to this new state of acceptance. It
makes him all the more anxious to set to work building his own hut: objective
number two. Objective number one is still to figure out a way to get to one of
the towns upriver so he can buy a dugout canoe and a motor.

The Malarialogìa hut is across the
Orinoco, serving both the Upper and the Lower Bisaasi-teri villages, which are
themselves separated by the Mavaca and by a distance of a few hundred yards.
The thought of this third shabono he has yet to even lay eyes on bunches up the
passages of his intestines, raising a bubble of mild nausea up through his
stomach into his brain. I need genealogies for them all, he thinks, and I have
to come up with a way to get them without using anyone’s name in public. I
suppose I’ll just have them whisper each other’s names in my ear.

But that would require knowing the
words for whisper and ear, wouldn’t it? He laughs quietly to himself.

Lac reflects on how thinking of the
big picture makes it easier for him to get past his multitude of minor daily
miseries, while it also puts into starker relief how large and elaborate a
project he’s embarked upon. From the broader perspective, humiliations like he
suffered on the bridge yesterday seem small and insignificant, but his overall
list of tasks seems all the more overwhelming. The whole culture is based on
kinship for Christ’s sake, he thinks. How am I supposed to understand any of it
as long as I don’t know how any of the people here are related to each other?
And how am I supposed to figure out who’s related to whom, in what way, if I
can’t even get their names?

Incidentally, the genealogies are
exactly what Nelson and his team are hoping I can supply as they conduct their
medical and genetics research. So forget all of that bluster about reconciling
Darwin with Levi-Strauss—it’s going to be a struggle to complete the most basic
ethnography, to write and defend an adequate dissertation, to earn my PhD and
become an anthropologist, an actual scientist.

Standing in the shallow current
near the river bank, his feet sinking in the mud, Lac lifts the water he’s
cupping between his hands up to his face while scanning the far bank, looking
for any sign of the Malarialogìa men. They’d hide their boat, he thinks, just
like Clemens and I did. I just have to hope that when they return—if they
return—they’ll announce themselves somehow to the people here. And won’t they
have to? After all, their job is to monitor the native population so they can
contain outbreaks; they can’t very well do that without stopping for a visit,
however brief. Of course, they could stop and consult with some villagers—or
with the damned headman even—and there’s no guarantee I’d hear a word about it,
especially since I could hear that word and not have any idea what the hell it
means. Standing fully upright now, still ankle-deep in the water, Lac looks
longingly at where he thinks the Malarialogìa men would beach their canoe.

He takes the rag he had wrapped
around his mouth to keep the bugs out, soaks it in the river, wrings it gently,
and then uses it to dab behind his neck and all over his chest. His other worry
is that the Malarialogìa men may not really take their job seriously. Venezuela
is not the United States. We complain about bureaucrats and their lazy
functionaries back home, but here it’s so bad it’s hard to believe. Bribery
isn’t only accepted—it’s expected. And just because it’s somebody’s job,
nominally, to check on the Indians once in a while to see if any of them have
contracted an infectious disease, you can’t assume he’s actually going to do
anything but fish, visit people along the river, lord his slightly more
civilized ways over the natives, and search for opportunities to profit from
his position.

For now, Lac has no recourse to any
other means of travel; he can’t even make it across the river to see if anyone’s
staying in the hut. When he arrived at Bisaasi-teri that first day, he and
Clemens pulled the rowboat up the muddy bank and tucked it between the roots of
a giant kopek. Nobody leaves a boat docked in the open for all who pass to see,
and Lac struggles to make peace with the thought that the men he seeks could be
cooking outside their hut this very moment and he wouldn’t know. He lifts his
gaze over the crowns of the immense trees lining the river, looking for smoke
that could be from a campfire. He sees nothing but a smattering of
resplendently green parakeets riding the currents of the wind up near the tops
of the trees.

Standing there in the water, the
mud pressing up between his toes, his body wet and dripping, Lac closes his
eyes to bask in the sun, feel its warmth absorb into his skin, and savor
another fleeting respite from his tasks, troubles, and torments. You’d have to
be blind not to see how beautiful it is out here, he thinks. Even as he thinks
it, a prickling at his neck triggers an automatic lift of his hand and smack
against the back of his neck. He takes one last buoying breath before
dislodging his feet from where they’ve sunk and sloshing to shore. As he climbs
the bank, he has to ward off a surge of panic, a claustrophobic realization of
how trapped he is, how hopeless any effort at escaping the jungle would be.

But this has been the plan all
along.

Back at Clemens’s hut, he opens his
barrels and gathers the tools he’ll need for the first stage of his
construction project, which should entail prospecting a location, clearing the
ground, establishing supply routes for deliveries of materials, and with any
luck recruiting some Yąnomamö to help with the heavy-lifting. Lac understands
the basics of building a mud-and-thatch hut well enough; he’s just never
actually done it. The Yąnomamö, on the other hand, are at the very least expert
roofers.

Already the children are starting
to show up. In the daylight, some of them, some of the time, are allowed to
wander away from the shabono, as long as it’s only as far as the visiting
nabä’s living quarters. Stepping outside, Lac takes a moment to try and convey
to them what his plans are; he gestures with both hands at the hut, shapes a
square in the empty space before his body, framing the structure, and then
mimes stacking mud bricks one atop the other to form the walls. The kids think
it’s great fun watching the silly nabä dance around like this, but give no
indication they understand any of what he’s attempting to communicate.

Lac has been working many hours by
the time the commotion inside the shabono begins, early in the evening. The day
is still hot, punishingly so, and as has become the norm Lac is surrounded by
children, the oldest of whom are genuinely making themselves useful. They’d started
pitching in spontaneously, but anticipating their later demands for payment, Lac
has decided to offer them fishhooks and nylon fishing line, which in each case
they’ve accepted eagerly, leading him to presume they know what these things
are and how to use them, and setting him to pondering where they might have learned
how to fish using Westerner’s tricks.

Two full-grown men—waro patas—have
likewise been lending a hand, albeit less assiduously, one of whom is
Waddu-ewantow, who himself has no problem working it seems, but can’t manage to
leave well enough alone when it comes to his payment. Lac’s perception of his
demandingness has shifted now that he’s been subjected to it over extended
intervals. Whereas at first he saw it as a type of childish greed, he now
senses a dynamic operating beneath the surface. He’s not really interested in
getting twice as many hooks as the younger boys; he’s interested in the
recognition of his special status, of which the extra hooks are merely a
symbol. Not that an abiding sense of entitlement is such a redeeming quality,
but there’s a playfulness blunting the edge of his mischief. Don’t be charmed
by his smiles and his goofball antics, Lac keeps insisting to himself. Remember
he may kill you if you uttered the wrong few words—or if you publically
addressed him by name. Luckily, I don’t know his name, so that’s only going to
be an issue if I stumble upon it accidently—a new hazard he hasn’t thought to
worry about before.

Now that something is afoot inside
the shabono, all his workers are rushing off, leaving him to stand, covered in
mud, in front of a wall built up to the height of his waist, the thick posts
sticking up from it with their skinny palm wood crossbeams looking naked and
pathetic. He sighs. Then he runs back to Clemens’s hut, wets a towel, and wipes
off his hands and arms as best he can before grabbing his notebook, passing on
the idea of the camera because there won’t be sufficient light, and heading to
the shabono.

The anger in the shouts he’s
swallowed in as he waddles through the entrance renders him hollow, a shivering
puddle of man barely capable moving forward, or of even holding a shape. Finally,
Lac’s resolve falters, stopping him midway through the passage running between
the cords of wood. To shore up his courage, or to distract himself as he
presses on without it, he whispers a prayer to his wife—a prayer he doesn’t
believe she can possibly hear.

When he stands up, blinking and
holding his hand up to block the last of the day’s light, he immediately sees
the fracas is taking place some distance away, at the center of a crowd of Yąnomamö
men. He releases the air from his lungs, feels something loosening between his
diaphragm and his stomach—he’d thought perhaps the shouting was about him, the
village collectively working toward a decision on whether to porcupine him and
disperse his madohe among the prominent patriarchs. There are your strategic
resources, ha! But no one seems concerned with him at all. If only that were
the case more often, he thinks before steeling himself for whatever he’s about
to witness and moving toward the crowd near the center of the plaza. The noise
and the odor of bodies assault him anew. Every time I think I’m finally getting
used to it, he thinks, I run smack dab into an entirely new level.

Young boys scramble around a
densely packed circle of jumpy, volatile men, trying to gain a vantage on
what’s happening at the center. It’s a fight, Lac realizes, just like we used
to have after school back home. He searches for familiar faces, thinking
stupidly that one of them may provide answers. The crowd suddenly surges as all
the bodies lurch in unison. Lac, circling everyone at a short distance, feels
the boys’ frustration, alongside their exhilaration. It’s hopeless. He turns
around to see if there’s any type of raised platform he can climb atop to get a
view onto the action, and he sees instead a number of women, many holding
babies at their hips, a few unleashing violent torrents of invective, the
vehemence of their words setting their bodies into a jerky face-lashing dance.

Lac’s not sure how many combatants
have taken the center, but whatever they’re fighting about must have
ramifications for the whole village. He turns back as the men take up a
collective howl that rises in intensity and pitch along an upward swoop,
until—a sound, an awful gut-twisting sound sends him reeling back as everything
is drowned in the men’s roaring and cheering and laughter. The crowd now
loosens as the bodies sway and surge forward and then back again. Lac rushes in
to claim a space but runs into a wall of sweaty backs as the men close ranks
and begin their ascending howl again, with that sickening sound punctuating the
crescendo. Like the end of a thick wooden dowel colliding with a pile of
uncooked meat. More cheers and laughter. More angry shouts. More shuffling.
Then the howling buildup again.

Lac steps back and tries to lift
himself beyond his full height by raising up on his toes and stepping onto any
higher ground he can find. He can’t see anything through the press of shoulders
and backs with their taut bronze skin, but he glimpses a flash over everyone’s
heads. He knows what’s happening now. With those things, he thinks, it would be
more like getting whipped than clubbed—or like getting clubbed with a pool cue
that’s half again the normal length and has some bend to it. That was the
whacking sound he heard, the end of one of these poles smacking against human
flesh.

With no warning, the crush of
bodies stumbles to the left in unison; Lac, close enough to get caught in the
jostling, struggles to stay on his feet and hold his ground. Suddenly, he’s
looking straight at the man, one of them anyway, who’s been receiving and
delivering the blows. He’s standing there, leaning on his pole for balance but
swaying, with blood streaming down the side of his face onto his shoulder and
chest. Lac looks him over as quickly as he can, detecting no other welts or
wounds, before having his view blocked by the waves of Yąnomamö men with heads
sprouting globes of thick shimmering black hair.

Stepping away now, or trying to,
Lac thinks, imagine getting beat over the head with the heavy end of a pool cue,
over and over again. Later, he’ll shudder at the idea. For now, he returns to
his plan of climbing atop some elevated surface to get a direct vantage on the
fight. The howling build-up begins again. Then comes the thwack against the
combatant’s head. Lac sees none of it. He considers climbing on someone’s
shoulders, but how could he possibly do that without seeming to attack the
person? The shouts building in intensity again, another thwack, and then—a
fraught silence falls over the crowd. Lac can hear individual voices
now—enjoining their kinsman to recover and persevere? He listens closely,
looking at all the men around him to gauge their reactions.

The packing of bodies loosens
again; Lac can feel the tension still throbbing, leaving him to wonder if the
two sides will be satisfied with the fight’s outcome or whether another
fight—perhaps a melee—will ensue. And me? he wonders. Which side would I be on?
His question is more practical than philosophical; he wants to know where he should
stand, when he should flee, to whom he might turn for protection. With no
answers, he edges toward the side of the plaza, toward the living spaces
beneath the vast circular roof. As he did during the storm this morning, he
seeks out a support post to hold onto for some balance and a sense of fixity. The
crowd surrounding the combatants is dispersing meanwhile, and shouting matches
are breaking out all over the shabono. Lac eyes the passage he’ll eventually
exit through, but he’s determined to first get a good enough look at the
combatants’ faces to make sure he’ll be able to recognize them later, as he’s
puzzling out the story. Does this have anything to do with the fight over those
stolen women?

So he waits, eying the crowd,
taking notes to appear busy—even though he suspects it matters naught—and
watching for signs of easing tension. After some time, he believes he can
discern the supporters of one side of the dispute from those of the other.
Indeed, insofar as he can recognize the men’s faces and connect them to their
various sections of the shabono, he’s certain it’s those from one area who are
pitted against those of another area. Of course, he thinks, you’d want to live
close to your closest kin. What you’re seeing here is probably a feud between
two lineages as much as a disagreement between two individuals that escalated
into violence.

With this simple organizing
principle—closer kin closer together in the shabono—Lac suddenly feels less
hopeless about his prospects for successfully collecting genealogies. You can
get a start even without the names, he assures himself. And maybe you can make
up names, or hell numerical sequences, to use as placeholders until you figure
out what their actual names are.

After some further shifting of
bodies, Lac has a clear line of sight across a short stretch of the plaza on a
man being lowered by his arm to a sitting position, by a man who’s probably a
brother. The side of the wounded man’s face is entirely slicked over now with
the blood issuing from high on his scalp. Without having witnessed the fight
directly, Lac now begins to understand how it must have transpired. The howls
were signs of turn-taking: one man gets to deliver a blow with his club, and
then the other gets to return the favor. Lac quietly resolves to avoid, however
long he ends up residing among the Yąnomamö, however immersed he becomes in
their culture, ever having to participate in one of these duels.

Imagine just standing there, he
thinks. I mean, can they try to parry?

When Lac sees the headman in the
vicinity of the injured man, he feels safe enough to approach. A few men speak
to him as he passes but don’t wait around for a response. One man grabs him by the
shoulders, issuing a fusillade of frantic words, and then turns to point at the
bleeding man. Good, Lac thinks when he’s released, they want me to examine
him—but why? Maybe Clemens has acquired a reputation for treating wounds, aided
by his meager supply of Western medical technologies, and the Yąnomamö now
assume it’s a skill possessed by all nabäs, in which case they’ll be expecting me
to do something for this poor man.

Lac, affecting savoir faire,
walks up to the group gathered around the injured man. Already, he’s wondering
what he could possibly do for a skull fracture, assuming that’s what he’ll be
dealing with. The men passively watch as he approaches, squeezing in among
them, taking advantage of the nonexistence of rules governing personal space.
They let him get close, not exactly encouraging him, but not stopping him.
Maybe they don’t expect anything from me after all, he thinks. Everyone seems
to be taking turns looking closely and fondling the wound. Lac watches their
faces intently, trying to piece together the story. One man looks concerned.
One looks shocked and incredulous. One appears as though he’s concealing a
grin. They all look excited, winding down after the recent frenzy, amid the
aftermath of an event both worrying and—what? Fun?

It occurs to Lac that however
closely he tracks the subtle dynamics of the Yąnomamö’s expressions and
demeanors, he can’t be sure his instincts for deciphering them are properly
calibrated; the ways they express various emotions may be foreign to him. They
may even have expressions and labels for—and hence experience—feelings
Westerners are entirely unfamiliar with. But so far at least, he thinks, I’d
say my instincts have proved mostly on the mark, and that’s lucky considering
I’ve had to rely on them like never before in my life, not knowing more than a
handful of the words used here.

When his turn to check out the
man’s head wound comes, Lac sees that a rather large flap of skin hangs loose
from where it should be pulled tight over his skull—sees it courtesy of another
man who fingers it, seemingly to demonstrate some point in the argument he’s
making. Lac lifts a hand to his mouth as his gorge gives a threatening leap.
This man is going to bleed to death, he thinks, stepping away. And who even
knows if that’s the full extent of the damage? He could easily have a skull
fracture as well.

Once again, Lac finds himself
standing amid a thick crowd of Yąnomamö—this time comprised of both men and
women—drowned in the deafening din of their unmodulated voices and the
nauseating odor of their bodies, grateful not to be the focus of their
collective attention, all but glorying in the moment’s absence of menacing
demands.

***

The Yąnomamö club fight, Lac writes
by flashlight, serves a function similar to that of a release valve. That is to
say there seems to be a good deal of tension built up between the two
factions—likely two rival lineages—represented by the two individual fighters.
With every uptick in the tension, the threat of a wider conflict increases.
Rather than allow their grievances to multiply, and their animosity to intensify,
they let some disputes boil over, dousing the flames underneath the pot, as it
were, but not thoroughly soaking the embers, meaning the strife can be
rekindled with enough further provocation, leading to yet another flare-up.
This is of course speculation, since I have no way of knowing what caused the
dispute; I never even figured out a way to ask any of the Yąnomamö what
happened.

How does one work into pantomime
the question, “What incited this club fight?”

Lac vacillates between hardnosed
determination and frustrated despair as he ponders the abounding mysteries of
village life. Not knowing the language, he’s stuck doing little more than going
through the motions—and that makes him sick. In keeping with what he’s aware is
becoming a nightly ritual, he finds much of the space of his thoughts taken up
by Laura. He can’t quite work out the niceties of how the argument occurring in
his mind would unfold, but he has the complicated sense of unwittingly proving
her side, or giving the impression of doing so anyway. Hasn’t she implied that
going through the motions is all this anthropology fieldwork business has ever been
about for him—as though staying in motion is the important part, not whatever
goals he claims, or wants to believe, he’s trying to achieve?

Has she ever actually said anything
like that?

The closest she’s come would’ve
been during one of her bouts of theorizing about how he’s replaying old family
struggles. At no point has she contended that he’s not really interested in
learning about primitive societies, contributing to our own society’s
understanding of how cultures evolve, the paths along which they advance, how
we’ve come from living in small nomadic bands to the crowded, hectic,
staggeringly complex existence we take for granted today. And she’s willing to
come live out here with me, he thinks, bringing the kids along with her. She
must not think my endeavors too misguided, my efforts too misdirected, my
beliefs about my own desires and motivations too mistaken.

All of this untangling of knotted
thoughts and feelings makes him all the more desperate to talk to her. But
there’s no way to bring any of this up over shortwave radio, even if he manages
to get access to one. Could he explain it in a letter perhaps? That would mean
diverting a lot of his time and concentration from his work, his pointless
work, further demonstrating its pointlessness, proving her even more right.

Lac rearranges the flashlight as he
returns to his writing, now lower on the notebook page. After the fight, he
writes, I was allowed to examine the loser’s head wound, and seeing it set in
motion a response I’m only now questioning the ethics of. The man had a
three-inch flap of skin dangling by a small patch still attached to his scalp. Concerned
about the bleeding, I immediately set about trying to stop it. Lac looks up
from his writing, wondering if he should include a line about how anxious he
was to show his value, to contribute something of use to the Yąnomamö. He
decides against it—not really relevant, scientifically speaking.

My first instinct was to get the
man to Clemens’s hut, where I could sit him under a flashlight and minister to
the wound without jostling or distraction. But I was at a loss as to how to get
him to move, so I went to the hut alone to dig out my first aid supplies. I
knew I would have to stitch the wound if I was to have any hope of stanching
the blood, something I’d never done before and, frankly, wasn’t sure I had the
stomach for. The immediate obstacle, though, was the seeming impossibility of
explaining the procedure to the man’s rather protective male relatives.

Before leaving the hut, I picked up
a rag I’d left on the makeshift table I made yesterday (which I’ve only set on
fire three times so far). Back in the shabono, I demonstrated what I intended
to do by sewing one end of the rag to the other, all the while keeping a wary
eye on the family’s rivals across the plaza. The Yąnomamö responded by clicking
their tongues in what I’ve come to interpret as approval. A few of them even
volunteered, unprompted, to hold the injured man in place as I first cleaned
and then stitched the wound. The task was made much more difficult, I have to
confess, by the tremble in my hands.

Lac looks up again, his mind awash
in the remembered details he must choose among to string together a clear
narrative. Should I write about how afraid I was that my poor diet of late, my lack
of sleep, and my constant state of stress were making me reckless, heedless of
my safety, as I moved about the village in a near trace—days on end incessantly
molested by bareto and mosquitoes, never free of spiders, cockroaches, and
rodents? Should I write about how the Yąnomamö’s cooperation with my treatment
efforts made me wonder whether Clemens had stitched wounds for them before? Or
whether they’re simply smart enough to grasp what I was doing? Should I write
about how, despite my fear and repulsion, I worked like a man possessed by some
mad demon because it felt so good to demonstrate some form of competence before
the Yąnomamö, before Bahikoawa and Waddu-ewantow, before my rescuers—who
weren’t around but would surely hear of the feat—and all the men who’d laughed
at me crossing the bridge? How I felt like I may be earning my first dollop of
respect? Or how I can’t close my eyes now without seeing the wound vividly in
my mind’s eye, that mangled scalp oozing blood from under the shreds of skin?

He sighs before going back to
writing. After tending to the man’s wound, I made a startling discovery: I had
already noticed a significant number of the men shave circular patches on the
crowns of their heads—a sort of tonsure. Despite their diminutive statures,
though, I hadn’t seen that these men were sporting these bald spots, not as
part of some symbolic communication with the deities, but to expose the scars
they retain from past club fighting wounds. It’s a warning, I believe, like
saying, “Don’t trifle with me, I’ve fought valiantly before, as you can clearly
see for yourself, and I’m perfectly willing to do so again.”